User Motivations for Tweeting Research Articles: A Content Analysis Approach

Nowadays Twitter is used to disseminate scientific findings to the general public, and how often research articles are tweeted is a major metric in altmetrics. So it is important to understand tweet authors' citation motivations and attitudes (or sentiments) towards the articles they cite. A content analysis approach was used to analyze 2,016 English tweets citing academic papers in the field of psychology. The results showed that most tweets (52.88%) cited articles to summarize the scientific findings of the studies. 11.81% of the tweets contained only the titles and URLs of the articles, and 19.05% of the tweets were retweets. Most tweeters held a neutral attitude towards the articles they tweeted, and only 5.15% showed negative feeling. In summary, most of the tweets do not convey in-depth critical discussion of academic papers, but they provide good access to some interesting research findings.